LITERATURE: Defecation, Disgust, and a Hostile Tightrope
DEFECATION AND DISGUST
V. S. Naipaul
An Area of Darkness
A caustic travel memoir, an unafraid foray into the non-politically-correct, a highly judgmental and opinionated examination of India that only a person who had not been raised in India would be able to write and that only a person of Indian descent would dare to write. In the lovey-dovey multicultural world of today, of California, of the Bay Area, of Berkeley, one reading this becomes bemused and then amused -- if one can get over one’s shock, as one does when one starts to tell oneself that this man ethnically is Indian and thus has the right to criticize. Anyone else spending pages on public defecation everywhere in India, on the pursuit of image and dream at the expense of progress (what’s progress? - ask our idiot postmodernists, unfamiliar with countries without sanitation, literacy, decent roads, or plentiful hospitals and schools), on a castigation of the caste system more for its inefficiency than for its inherent cruelty, would be nailed to the wall by a lynch mob of American Hindus and, worse, bespectacled lesbians of either sex (but sex is only a construct, right? then try having a baby, Tomas) with master’s degrees in rhetoric or women’s studies and a working knowledge of Foucault but nothing of Jeremy Bentham. This book will annoy. It is not meant to, but innocently (it was published in 1964) (oh, I forgot – there are no innocent readings or writings, everything is “imbricated” in Power) records the dire disappointment, the deep and doleful disgust of a Trinidad-born, Oxford-educated native son who has returned to the old country. Impossible to put down; sad in many parts but never a tearjerker, and also terribly funny and human throughout. Naipaul’s knowledge of – and appreciation of the utter importance of possessing a knowledge of – History animates his observations without pedantry, and his deep but quiet erudition in modern literature situates his criticism of Indian culture in a powerful and sophisticated way while remaining formally only a highly readable travel memoir and nothing else.
HOSTILE TIGHTROPE
James Goad
The Redneck Manifesto (1997) and Shit Magnet
One’s emotions pulse between an admiration and a contempt for Goad like alternating current. He wrote the hilarious and often brilliant zine Answer Me! in the early 1990s, the only zine that dared to intelligently ridicule the vast pretensions of the counterculture, mainly the punk rock counterculture, and did so in marvelous style and with a complete absence of typos, grammar flaws, or the other maladroit monstrosities that bepepper the stapled-together, crudely photocopied, poorly thought out artifacts of Idiot Rebellion that Goad ridiculed. Goad’s zine tore apart zines and the “culture” that spawned them, and he walked a fine but hostile tightrope between becoming the garbage he spurned and becoming a forefinger-waving, naughtiness-accusing male schoolmarm. However, he avoided the latter stance by including such highly dubious, and by now also very pretentious-seeming features in his magazine as a sinister set of sick hagiographies of serial killers, suicides, and mass-murderers.
Goad happily moved on to other subjects. The Redneck Manifesto, a smart and always hilarious combination of elite-bashing and revisionist history. But this is not revisionist history in the style of Howard Zinn or the U. C. Berkeley AC (“american cultures”) requirement, better known as the PC requirement, whose crude message -- in the form I was forced to take, what could have been a fascinating course on antebellum American history – consisted of the following “historical” lessons: 1.) White people are bad; “people of color” are good. Any time a “person of color” has done anything violent or awful, it has been an entirely legitimate rebellion, or at least an understandable reaction, against white dominance. 2.) Heterosexuals are bad; homosexuals are good. 3.) Males are bad; females are good. This carries to nonhuman males and females too, dammit, and any time a female does something bad (cf. Medea or Clytemnestra) see Justification under first lesson. 4.) Christians are bad; non-Christians are good. No, Goad wants to defend rednecks, hillbillies, and “white trash”: not any old white persons, but the poor uneducated ones, the ones whose poverty, missing teeth, bad eating habits, and so on it is still politically correct for liberals to laugh about. Goad defends them not out of Christlike desire to defend the marginals but because he himself is from their caste.
Goad compares indentured servitude in the Colonies and early republic to slavery, relying, ironically, on Howard Zinn to do this. He reports on the consistently cheerful usage of “white trash” in the media and in dictionaries, as opposed to the ostracized lexical item “nigger.” He spends a fair amount of time in personal anecdote of the slights he has received for his own background, especially at the hands of the Los Angeles Weekly, one of the better of the awful free liberal weekly newspapers that pollute our country (but that do have useful event listings, one must add).
In fact, he spends an awe-inspiringly brilliant entire section on these journals, embedded within the marvelous and sarcastically-titled chapter Several Compelling Arguments for the Enslavement of All White Liberals, opening with a madly perceptive quote from Industrial Society and its Future, the Unabomber Manifesto. However, what about Goad’s writing? Let me quote Goad to give you a dose of his style, inflected by hip-hop and, perhaps, a third-generation (but hardly third-rate) shadow of Louis-Ferdinand Celine: “I’m a cynic. A skeptic. A partial epileptic. I’m sadistic, yet I find myself unable to enjoy it…. I’m a fly in the ointment. A Goad in the machine. A glob of sperm at the bottom of your popcorn.” And, later, “I started losing faith in liberalism when I began noticing that every liberal who accused me of white privilege seemed to come from a more privileged socioeconomic background than I did. I got sick of their middle-class hypocrisy that shed tears for the black “struggle” while laughing at my white-trash roots. If indigenous Amazonian tribes were subjected to acid rain, the liberals were emotionally devastated. But if a trailer park full of white trash across town all got cancer because they lived atop a toxic dump, it was a joke.” (p 236)
In his critique of liberal weekly newspapers, starting on page 238, for those of us at least who have read and been annoyed by these journals for many years, Goad shines, shines, shines, providing a satirically hostile intensity of exaggerated images that almost compares to Juvenal, the greatest satirist of first-century AD Rome or any time before or since (see next review).
“It’s a free weekly, and it’s worth every penny. These alternative weeklies thrive on advertising, because it certainly isn’t the writing. Futon prices slashed and universal brotherhood. Colonic irrigation while astral-projecting. Ceramic dildoes on sale and how to tell if you’re a sexist. Pierced nipples and punctured brains. Dull tattoo rebellion. Classified ads for gay cruises and lesbian home furnishings. Nudist bed-and-breakfast weekend retreats. Reiki bodywork for men. A drowning sense of wellness. Anal isometrics. Anti-smoking spirit-channeling hypnotherapists. Voluntary herpes-cream experiments. Holistic veterinary clinics. Marimba benefits for persons with AIDS. High financed tax-free arts foundations. Giant corporate sponsors spreading good will.
“Ballet. Performance art. Modern dance. Pottery class taught by an old woman from Guadalajara. Bulk-grain foods in large cardboard barrels. Forceful coffinlike enclosure in a saline flotation tank with twenty-four hours of feminist folk music pumped in at one hundred twenty decibels. Scented candles, closed minds. Unicorn incense holders and a knife to the throat. Homeopathic herbal remedies and a bullet to the brain. Shiatsu foot therapy and glass fragments rubbed into your skin. Rebirthing and a bloody smear of afterbirth. So full of their own shit, it’s a wonder they don’t sprout daisies.”
The storm of images of hilarity, happily, is tempered by more piercing critique: “[The liberal hipsters’] ideas of ‘freedom’ are purely a fashion show – freedom to suck cock, smoke crack, and wear loud clothing … For much longer than I care to remember the ‘counterculture’ has been an empty parade of runway models with needles in their arms. Bratty slackoffs with nothing to say and a lot of costumes in which way to say it. The rotted produce of post-World-War II prosperity, taking money from their parents with one hand while flipping them off with the other. While the angriest segment of society – and thus the most disillusioned, open to new ideas, and most potentially creative – was stinking up the assembly line with its bone-sapping labor, the leisure-class art geeks tossed out frilly satirical lead balloons, weighted by irony and one hundred percent substance free.” (p. 239)
He wrote his most recent book, Shit Magnet, in jail whilst he served a few years for beating up his girlfriend. The police cross-referenced this crime with the fourth issue of Answer Me!, which, some people argued, celebrated rape. That issue was repulsive but, I think, satirical, and at times sympathetic. One of the questions it insisted on: why is it that feminists dogmatically dictate that rape is a worse crime than beatings or murder? Why do people believe this? The issue featured a fascinating although stomach turning article by Donny the Punk on his own experiences of jail gang-rape (he was the victim, not a perpetrator) which reads like repellent gay porn (see the cover of the Coil album Scatology for an example) but is sadly and horribly true. The issue also featured one of the sickest things I have ever read, what seemed to be a masturbation fantasy from one Peter Soto, whose disgusting compilation of his own child rape zine Goad also published, allegedly for First Amendment support reasons. Goad, you may realize, is not an entirely sympathetic character. My brother, who has met him twice or thrice and interviewed him for his own now sadly departed Los Angeles punk zine Glossolalia, reports that Goad is an extremely polite person “but not someone you’d want to cross.”
Such publications did not endear the court system to Goad, and undoubtedly worsened his sentence. In Shit Magnet, he explains what went wrong with him, starting with his childhood and the constant beatings he received. Some of this last is written in a juvenile singsong that I found nauseating. He moves on to explain the history of his relationships: the first with Debbie, his ex-wife who died of cancer, and much of this is movingly written; the second with Anne, a quite imbalanced young masochistic sex-maniac he hooked up with, alas, while still married to Debbie. People will do many things for deeply satisfying sex, and even for the promise that it might occur. Goad never left Anne despite escalating threats back and forth, despite her assaulting him and trash-talking about him in the apparently incestuous zine community in Portland, Oregon, where all this drama took place; he left her a number of times, even enacted a restraining order against her, but voluntarily and melodramatically returned to her many times too. Everything crescendoed in his beating her in a car ride, at which point he got arrested and began his sentence. The book, especially this section, has great interest as a tale of amour fou. Yet Goad’s refusal to adopt a better philosophy of life throughout it, even at the end, makes him even harder to sympathize with than his personal history and publication choices already does. He leaves prison a worse man, “more subhuman and more superhuman but definitely less human” as he relates in a web site interview elsewhere.
Moreover, speaking of superhuman, the book pushes a pair of ugly conceits throughout. The first consists of that variety of Nietzscheanism that one finds uttered in the mouths of the vulgar, that I first used to hear in the mid-1980s from certain persons I knew in the Los Angeles punk scene who found themselves in juvenile hall, jail, and prison quite often. “I’m stronger than him so I took his doctor marten boots. It’s like Nietzsche said. The strong prevail over the weak, and that’s the way it is, and any way of denying that or trying to prevent that is bullshit and evidence of a sick society.” Now, I am not one to carefully and finely discuss the niceties of Nietzschean interpretation, as I have never found much of admiration or interest in his writings to begin with, but I would hesitate before asserting that Friedrich had that in mind. Goad’s entire text quivers with this sort of thing, with the ideology of the abused: people abused me when I was helpless and small because they had more power than me and they wanted to and they could, so they did. No one stopped them. This is the way the world works. This is how it is. There is nothing to be done about this universal rule but accept it. Shit Magnet secondly applies this sort of moral nihilism (or is it only depression?) to the political realm. His philosophy of government is shockingly naïve, the sort of thing one only hears from committed anarchists and misanthropes. A man may be excused for a certain level of misanthropy: that is personal and can be worked around. Anarchism, however, is idiocy, as any historian, or even any person who has read more than ten history books, well knows. A few courses in political science might help him out a bit. One gets the impression when he is mouthing these pseudo-Nietzschean platitudes that his intended audience consists of a fantasy cult of Taxi Driver wannabees. This is a shame, because his writerly gifts, and the legitimate points he makes about the denigration of America’s white working class deserve a more serious, perhaps even scholarly audience. If I were teaching American and not ancient history, I would assign my students Redneck Manifesto in a heartbeat as a cranky classic. But Goad, self-destructively, seems not to want to find something better and work for it, not to want to change his habits out of a perverse allegiance to a degraded version of authenticity. I admire Goad on a few levels, but vainly. It is Goad’s failure to develop and adopt a better philosophy of life and of government, that damns him forever to the white trash half-world whose existence he decries.
(Naipaul, postmodernists, India, Bentham, Panopticon, Foucault, Berkeley, Goad, zine, punk rock, satire, Juvenal, white trash, redneck, hillbilly, Answer Me, Unabomber, Redneck Manifesto, prison rape, misanthropy, Nietzsche, doctor martens, Taxi Driver, masochistic sex-maniac)
V. S. Naipaul
An Area of Darkness
A caustic travel memoir, an unafraid foray into the non-politically-correct, a highly judgmental and opinionated examination of India that only a person who had not been raised in India would be able to write and that only a person of Indian descent would dare to write. In the lovey-dovey multicultural world of today, of California, of the Bay Area, of Berkeley, one reading this becomes bemused and then amused -- if one can get over one’s shock, as one does when one starts to tell oneself that this man ethnically is Indian and thus has the right to criticize. Anyone else spending pages on public defecation everywhere in India, on the pursuit of image and dream at the expense of progress (what’s progress? - ask our idiot postmodernists, unfamiliar with countries without sanitation, literacy, decent roads, or plentiful hospitals and schools), on a castigation of the caste system more for its inefficiency than for its inherent cruelty, would be nailed to the wall by a lynch mob of American Hindus and, worse, bespectacled lesbians of either sex (but sex is only a construct, right? then try having a baby, Tomas) with master’s degrees in rhetoric or women’s studies and a working knowledge of Foucault but nothing of Jeremy Bentham. This book will annoy. It is not meant to, but innocently (it was published in 1964) (oh, I forgot – there are no innocent readings or writings, everything is “imbricated” in Power) records the dire disappointment, the deep and doleful disgust of a Trinidad-born, Oxford-educated native son who has returned to the old country. Impossible to put down; sad in many parts but never a tearjerker, and also terribly funny and human throughout. Naipaul’s knowledge of – and appreciation of the utter importance of possessing a knowledge of – History animates his observations without pedantry, and his deep but quiet erudition in modern literature situates his criticism of Indian culture in a powerful and sophisticated way while remaining formally only a highly readable travel memoir and nothing else.
HOSTILE TIGHTROPE
James Goad
The Redneck Manifesto (1997) and Shit Magnet
One’s emotions pulse between an admiration and a contempt for Goad like alternating current. He wrote the hilarious and often brilliant zine Answer Me! in the early 1990s, the only zine that dared to intelligently ridicule the vast pretensions of the counterculture, mainly the punk rock counterculture, and did so in marvelous style and with a complete absence of typos, grammar flaws, or the other maladroit monstrosities that bepepper the stapled-together, crudely photocopied, poorly thought out artifacts of Idiot Rebellion that Goad ridiculed. Goad’s zine tore apart zines and the “culture” that spawned them, and he walked a fine but hostile tightrope between becoming the garbage he spurned and becoming a forefinger-waving, naughtiness-accusing male schoolmarm. However, he avoided the latter stance by including such highly dubious, and by now also very pretentious-seeming features in his magazine as a sinister set of sick hagiographies of serial killers, suicides, and mass-murderers.
Goad happily moved on to other subjects. The Redneck Manifesto, a smart and always hilarious combination of elite-bashing and revisionist history. But this is not revisionist history in the style of Howard Zinn or the U. C. Berkeley AC (“american cultures”) requirement, better known as the PC requirement, whose crude message -- in the form I was forced to take, what could have been a fascinating course on antebellum American history – consisted of the following “historical” lessons: 1.) White people are bad; “people of color” are good. Any time a “person of color” has done anything violent or awful, it has been an entirely legitimate rebellion, or at least an understandable reaction, against white dominance. 2.) Heterosexuals are bad; homosexuals are good. 3.) Males are bad; females are good. This carries to nonhuman males and females too, dammit, and any time a female does something bad (cf. Medea or Clytemnestra) see Justification under first lesson. 4.) Christians are bad; non-Christians are good. No, Goad wants to defend rednecks, hillbillies, and “white trash”: not any old white persons, but the poor uneducated ones, the ones whose poverty, missing teeth, bad eating habits, and so on it is still politically correct for liberals to laugh about. Goad defends them not out of Christlike desire to defend the marginals but because he himself is from their caste.
Goad compares indentured servitude in the Colonies and early republic to slavery, relying, ironically, on Howard Zinn to do this. He reports on the consistently cheerful usage of “white trash” in the media and in dictionaries, as opposed to the ostracized lexical item “nigger.” He spends a fair amount of time in personal anecdote of the slights he has received for his own background, especially at the hands of the Los Angeles Weekly, one of the better of the awful free liberal weekly newspapers that pollute our country (but that do have useful event listings, one must add).
In fact, he spends an awe-inspiringly brilliant entire section on these journals, embedded within the marvelous and sarcastically-titled chapter Several Compelling Arguments for the Enslavement of All White Liberals, opening with a madly perceptive quote from Industrial Society and its Future, the Unabomber Manifesto. However, what about Goad’s writing? Let me quote Goad to give you a dose of his style, inflected by hip-hop and, perhaps, a third-generation (but hardly third-rate) shadow of Louis-Ferdinand Celine: “I’m a cynic. A skeptic. A partial epileptic. I’m sadistic, yet I find myself unable to enjoy it…. I’m a fly in the ointment. A Goad in the machine. A glob of sperm at the bottom of your popcorn.” And, later, “I started losing faith in liberalism when I began noticing that every liberal who accused me of white privilege seemed to come from a more privileged socioeconomic background than I did. I got sick of their middle-class hypocrisy that shed tears for the black “struggle” while laughing at my white-trash roots. If indigenous Amazonian tribes were subjected to acid rain, the liberals were emotionally devastated. But if a trailer park full of white trash across town all got cancer because they lived atop a toxic dump, it was a joke.” (p 236)
In his critique of liberal weekly newspapers, starting on page 238, for those of us at least who have read and been annoyed by these journals for many years, Goad shines, shines, shines, providing a satirically hostile intensity of exaggerated images that almost compares to Juvenal, the greatest satirist of first-century AD Rome or any time before or since (see next review).
“It’s a free weekly, and it’s worth every penny. These alternative weeklies thrive on advertising, because it certainly isn’t the writing. Futon prices slashed and universal brotherhood. Colonic irrigation while astral-projecting. Ceramic dildoes on sale and how to tell if you’re a sexist. Pierced nipples and punctured brains. Dull tattoo rebellion. Classified ads for gay cruises and lesbian home furnishings. Nudist bed-and-breakfast weekend retreats. Reiki bodywork for men. A drowning sense of wellness. Anal isometrics. Anti-smoking spirit-channeling hypnotherapists. Voluntary herpes-cream experiments. Holistic veterinary clinics. Marimba benefits for persons with AIDS. High financed tax-free arts foundations. Giant corporate sponsors spreading good will.
“Ballet. Performance art. Modern dance. Pottery class taught by an old woman from Guadalajara. Bulk-grain foods in large cardboard barrels. Forceful coffinlike enclosure in a saline flotation tank with twenty-four hours of feminist folk music pumped in at one hundred twenty decibels. Scented candles, closed minds. Unicorn incense holders and a knife to the throat. Homeopathic herbal remedies and a bullet to the brain. Shiatsu foot therapy and glass fragments rubbed into your skin. Rebirthing and a bloody smear of afterbirth. So full of their own shit, it’s a wonder they don’t sprout daisies.”
The storm of images of hilarity, happily, is tempered by more piercing critique: “[The liberal hipsters’] ideas of ‘freedom’ are purely a fashion show – freedom to suck cock, smoke crack, and wear loud clothing … For much longer than I care to remember the ‘counterculture’ has been an empty parade of runway models with needles in their arms. Bratty slackoffs with nothing to say and a lot of costumes in which way to say it. The rotted produce of post-World-War II prosperity, taking money from their parents with one hand while flipping them off with the other. While the angriest segment of society – and thus the most disillusioned, open to new ideas, and most potentially creative – was stinking up the assembly line with its bone-sapping labor, the leisure-class art geeks tossed out frilly satirical lead balloons, weighted by irony and one hundred percent substance free.” (p. 239)
He wrote his most recent book, Shit Magnet, in jail whilst he served a few years for beating up his girlfriend. The police cross-referenced this crime with the fourth issue of Answer Me!, which, some people argued, celebrated rape. That issue was repulsive but, I think, satirical, and at times sympathetic. One of the questions it insisted on: why is it that feminists dogmatically dictate that rape is a worse crime than beatings or murder? Why do people believe this? The issue featured a fascinating although stomach turning article by Donny the Punk on his own experiences of jail gang-rape (he was the victim, not a perpetrator) which reads like repellent gay porn (see the cover of the Coil album Scatology for an example) but is sadly and horribly true. The issue also featured one of the sickest things I have ever read, what seemed to be a masturbation fantasy from one Peter Soto, whose disgusting compilation of his own child rape zine Goad also published, allegedly for First Amendment support reasons. Goad, you may realize, is not an entirely sympathetic character. My brother, who has met him twice or thrice and interviewed him for his own now sadly departed Los Angeles punk zine Glossolalia, reports that Goad is an extremely polite person “but not someone you’d want to cross.”
Such publications did not endear the court system to Goad, and undoubtedly worsened his sentence. In Shit Magnet, he explains what went wrong with him, starting with his childhood and the constant beatings he received. Some of this last is written in a juvenile singsong that I found nauseating. He moves on to explain the history of his relationships: the first with Debbie, his ex-wife who died of cancer, and much of this is movingly written; the second with Anne, a quite imbalanced young masochistic sex-maniac he hooked up with, alas, while still married to Debbie. People will do many things for deeply satisfying sex, and even for the promise that it might occur. Goad never left Anne despite escalating threats back and forth, despite her assaulting him and trash-talking about him in the apparently incestuous zine community in Portland, Oregon, where all this drama took place; he left her a number of times, even enacted a restraining order against her, but voluntarily and melodramatically returned to her many times too. Everything crescendoed in his beating her in a car ride, at which point he got arrested and began his sentence. The book, especially this section, has great interest as a tale of amour fou. Yet Goad’s refusal to adopt a better philosophy of life throughout it, even at the end, makes him even harder to sympathize with than his personal history and publication choices already does. He leaves prison a worse man, “more subhuman and more superhuman but definitely less human” as he relates in a web site interview elsewhere.
Moreover, speaking of superhuman, the book pushes a pair of ugly conceits throughout. The first consists of that variety of Nietzscheanism that one finds uttered in the mouths of the vulgar, that I first used to hear in the mid-1980s from certain persons I knew in the Los Angeles punk scene who found themselves in juvenile hall, jail, and prison quite often. “I’m stronger than him so I took his doctor marten boots. It’s like Nietzsche said. The strong prevail over the weak, and that’s the way it is, and any way of denying that or trying to prevent that is bullshit and evidence of a sick society.” Now, I am not one to carefully and finely discuss the niceties of Nietzschean interpretation, as I have never found much of admiration or interest in his writings to begin with, but I would hesitate before asserting that Friedrich had that in mind. Goad’s entire text quivers with this sort of thing, with the ideology of the abused: people abused me when I was helpless and small because they had more power than me and they wanted to and they could, so they did. No one stopped them. This is the way the world works. This is how it is. There is nothing to be done about this universal rule but accept it. Shit Magnet secondly applies this sort of moral nihilism (or is it only depression?) to the political realm. His philosophy of government is shockingly naïve, the sort of thing one only hears from committed anarchists and misanthropes. A man may be excused for a certain level of misanthropy: that is personal and can be worked around. Anarchism, however, is idiocy, as any historian, or even any person who has read more than ten history books, well knows. A few courses in political science might help him out a bit. One gets the impression when he is mouthing these pseudo-Nietzschean platitudes that his intended audience consists of a fantasy cult of Taxi Driver wannabees. This is a shame, because his writerly gifts, and the legitimate points he makes about the denigration of America’s white working class deserve a more serious, perhaps even scholarly audience. If I were teaching American and not ancient history, I would assign my students Redneck Manifesto in a heartbeat as a cranky classic. But Goad, self-destructively, seems not to want to find something better and work for it, not to want to change his habits out of a perverse allegiance to a degraded version of authenticity. I admire Goad on a few levels, but vainly. It is Goad’s failure to develop and adopt a better philosophy of life and of government, that damns him forever to the white trash half-world whose existence he decries.
(Naipaul, postmodernists, India, Bentham, Panopticon, Foucault, Berkeley, Goad, zine, punk rock, satire, Juvenal, white trash, redneck, hillbilly, Answer Me, Unabomber, Redneck Manifesto, prison rape, misanthropy, Nietzsche, doctor martens, Taxi Driver, masochistic sex-maniac)
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